Niall Ferguson Thinks War With Iran Is Just One Big Joke

February 06, 2012 3:57 pm ET —
Walid Zafar

Harvard
University historian Niall Ferguson is out with a new piece in The
Daily Beast arguing for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
"There are plenty of arguments against an Israeli attack on Iran," the subhead
of the article explains. But "all of them are bad." Ferguson writes:

There
are five reasons (I am told) why Israel should not attack Iran:

1. The Iranians would
retaliate with great fury, closing the Strait of Hormuz and unleashing the dogs
of terror in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iraq.

2. The entire region
would be set ablaze by irate Muslims; the Arab Spring would turn into a frigid
Islamist winter.

3. The world economy
would be dealt a death blow in the form of higher oil prices.

4. The Iranian regime
would be strengthened, having been attacked by the Zionists its propaganda so
regularly vilifies.

5. A nuclear-armed Iran
is nothing to worry about. States actually become more risk-averse once they
acquire nuclear weapons.

I
am here to tell you that these arguments are wrong.

What
comes next is not what you would expect; Ferguson does not explain why these
concerns (which are straw man arguments he's
summarized in ridiculous ways) are wrong, as you'd expect, but jokes away the
worries without even mentioning the real dangers of war. Like Matthew Kroenig's
much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs, which tried to make the case for a U.S. strike,
Ferguson mentions potential consequences of war but makes no serious effort to address the five points he's outlined. Both writers suffer from the same flaw:
downplaying failure while being overly optimistic about success.

Any
doubt that Ferguson takes war with Iran lightly
is eliminated by his depiction of an imaginary conservation between President Obama and David
Axelrod in which the president orders his people to provide
support for an Israeli attack on Iran — "line up those bunker busters" — but only after hearing that he isn't polling well
in Florida.

Frivolity aside, the piece is most noteworthy
not for what is mentioned but for what Ferguson avoided writing about: An aerial attack on Iran's nuclear
facilities will not stop the country's nuclear program, and almost certainly
will convince decision-makers there that they need to weaponize to protect
against future attacks. As Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has made clear, an
attack would
at most delay Iran's program by a few years. That fact alone should be enough
to put much of this dangerous speculation to rest.